Ive noticed something strange about my gentoo/computer's behavior. I will try to express it as well as i can, but unfortunately i incapable of getting too technical.

my system has a short attention span. after any sort of intensive app is open for a while its stops devoting energy to it and it begins running choppy. specific examples ive come across include wolfenstien, an opengl visualization plugin for xmms, or a terminal emulator emerging something in the background. After abgout 15 seconds my computer gets bored and the same app that was running fine when i opened it gets so stubborn i can barely use the mouse at all.

so how did i come to this conclusion? For one, i simply noticed my mouse's choppiness after wolfenstien was open for a few secs, and I witnessed a shell's emerging come to a standstill while i was just browsing the web. What convinced me something is wrong was monitoring Gkrellm while i ran the opengl spinning spectrum analyzer:

You know how there are two lines plotted in the cpu chart in Gkrellm. In the default skin one is blue and one is orange. Playing a song, the blue and the orange line are both below 8% + 5% respectivly. openning the spectrum analyzer into an almost full window the blue shoots up to 90% and the orange to about 50%. Everything is fine for a short while, when my orange drops back down to 5% and my fps in the analyzer goes, i'd say, from 30 to 3. if i try to open, say, konqueror at this time, the cpu doesnt give any serious effort for a few seconds from the "click" upon which it shoots to 100% for a split second and then does nothing again for a while. a total of fifteen seconds later the window pops up and the program runs like crap untill i start closing stuff or something.

i rarely breach 30% memory usage. i have a pIII coppermine 1ghz, 33mhz fsb, 256mb ram, ati raedon w/ 64mb, and a udma-33 old school 20 gig hd. and i know there is no reason for it to run this slow, especially in light of Mr. Robin's (self-proclaimed) focus on "interactive response" in gentoo, and his comparision of gentoo's responsivness to beos or amiga. I have a copy of beos on this computer and i can assure you a busy gentoo is MUCH less snappy then a busy BeOS. I installed the AC preemptive kernel and made sure the "preemptive kernel" feature was enabled in "make menuconfig."

does this make sense to anyone? i'm sure there are people who could have expressed all that in four sentences.

Weird. Show us the output of 'ps -A' and 'top'. Are you running any unusual programs like VMware? What kind of hardware do you have? What CFLAGS were used for compiling Gentoo._________________The greatest deeds are still undone, the greatest songs are still unsung...

AutoBot,
it probably only happens in X. im avoid hanging around the bash prompt too much.

sivar,
what exactly is a cflag. i used a stage 1 install and was very careful to follow the directions very exactly. is i686 the answer you are looking for? i recreated the problem below on a clean reboot. I waited for it to start skipping at which point i did a "top" at the shell.

here is the output of "top." at this point i simply reboot, opened xmms started the opengl plugin (which looks like its not rendering quite right, some of the bars are missing a wall) waited a few seconds and it started skipping.

It sounds to me like your entire issue is revolving around X and OpenGL, which leads me to believe your having problems with your ATI display driver._________________This message self destructed a long time ago.

i know pre-rmpt is on, math emulation is off, intel pIIxn chipset support is enabled, hor. and vert. screen res is set to 1024x768 (i use 1280 x 1024 now). the drm 4.1 driver is enabled for my radeon, blue tooth is disabled whatever that is. I couldnt find anything about low-latency, I alwasy just assumed that by using the AC kernel it would be enabled automatically. all the settings i just read off to you come from make menuconfig

i messed around with my hdparm settings and the bars are rendered better, and the glplugin runs a bit better, but it still hangs every other second for about 1/2 second. i should mention that i can play opengl games pretty well (not as well as in windows by a long shot). im still wondering why i canht test throughput using hdparm.
also, the performance in wolfenstein is much better. it used to be OK when one was inside but very poor in the outside parts of levels

/dev/hda:
could not allocate sharedmem buf: Function not implemented
could not allocate sharedmem buf: Function not implemented

i did everything else that was mentioned on that site and did increase my performance, but i can still see, using gkrellm and the opengl spec. anal. that my system stops devoting resources to a task after a little bit

in gears
2959 frames in 5.0 seconds = 591.800 FPS
but if you could SEE how it runs it is a microcosm of what is wrong... after a few seconds it looks like someone threw a wrench in the gears. they seem to stop and reverberate, then run normally, then stop alternating every second or two. the fps doesnt drop in the outpu but SMOOTH it is not

Well you are definately experiencing some sort of OpenGL/Xfree issue, I get much higher numbers with a processor that is only 533mhz and an equal card Nvidia GeForce II MX 400 (64Meg).

I don't know much about ATI cards other than there drivers are simply terrible from what I have seen. Perhaps you could try posting in the hardware forum with a title of ATI Driver Issues or something similar.

Alternatively I noticed xfree was in my --update world today, perhaps you could update to the newest X available and it may solve your choppy performace issue._________________This message self destructed a long time ago.

autobot, im going to take your word for it and circumvent the issue entirely. I switched my video card with my brothers GeForce II M400. so far no luck with 3D but thats a post for another forum and 10 hairs off my head

It sounds to me like your entire issue is revolving around X and OpenGL, which leads me to believe your having problems with your ATI display driver.

I second that. ATI Radeon's are great cards but since ATI doesn't place any emphasis on comprehensive driver support they are problem ridden when used under Linux. This is a shame, especially when compared to NVidia. What I would do is take another half-way decent video card and stick that into my board for testing purposes. That way you will at least be able to isolate the problem and find out if the card is indeed making trouble.